isametry

I wonder if SwiftDefaultApps might yield different results compared to the Cmd+I menu? It's a crude-yet-still-working preference pane for setting default apps in System Settings, rather than using example files:

https://github.com/Lord-Kamina/SwiftDefaultApps

You're probably right, just add it to the collection of "not-quite-window floating thingies", accompanied by Quick Notes, Stickies, Special Character Picker, Color Picker, Font Picker…

Sigh, I wish we could stop re-inventing what was already solved 25 years ago.

The “window” also doesn’t belong to an app! His menu bar continued to show Finder as the active app, not Siri.

Which means, if shipped like this, the Siri dialog will be a poor excuse for a window with:

- no Cmd+Tab, no Cmd+`

- no minimize??

- generally no presence in the Dock whatsoever

- no keyboard shortcuts beyond basic text editing ones

- no smart window resize

- …

So in other words, no Justin, that’s not a window. That’s a resizable Spotlight pop-up with an “X” button.

Well at least the metal part of any type-C plug will inherently be more fragile due to the hollow design and manufacturing by stamping out of sheet metal. Whereas for Lightning, it’s a solid machined part.

But as soon as you get to the chip housing and the rest of the cable, it’s anyone’s game I suppose.

>chrome/webkit and Firefox duopoly

Blink (Chrome) is not WebKit. If anything, the duopoly is Blink and WebKit at places 1 and 2 respectively.

Firefox is at around 3% market share. There’s no “-poly” to Gecko at all.

A kid raised on an animal sounds toy keyboard might also expect the computer to go “moo” when pressing the “M” key, but that doesn’t mean Apple should build that in. Expectations from previous platforms sometimes don’t fit others, and can be unlearned.

Nope, no bad faith here, I’d genuinely like to hear your use cases for the touchscreen.

I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse. In which case, yeah, the TouchBook would be degrading the experience for me and a huge portion of Mac users, thus making me sad.

I’d even say pipe dream of just Apple commentators and pundits. I’ve yet to hear from a normal, real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook.

This isn’t heavily censored social media, you can say Pornhub.

The status bar – as in: the area where the clock, battery and signal strength are shown – is absolutely always at the top of the screen on iOS.

The Circle (2017) is by no means a perfect movie, based on a 2013 book which I’m told is only marginally better.

But it did do a surprisingly accurate job of depicting pretty much this exact scenario, 9 (13) years in advance.

As in: sleek FAANG holds a grand showcase of mass surveillance using its ubiquitous user-installed smart cameras, under the guise of a good cause.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mro9RCAhvE4

(The fictional story is slightly more blunt about it, the good cause being finding wanted persons, rather than lost dogs).

> my own CLI browser but is more graphical

So based on the first paragraph, I would’ve assumed “CLI” and “graphical” were mutually exclusive? Did you in fact mean to type “TUI” here? Or is your program something like a hybrid between command-based input and graphical output?

As a non-native speaker, TIL that "magnifying glass" and "loupe" are not synonyms. According to Wikipedia:

> [Loupes] generally have higher magnification than a magnifying glass, and are designed to be held or worn close to the eye.

When you say "Apple's dominance", are you referring to a potential dominance?

Because in terms of actual dominance, Apple is far from that in laptops. Lenovo, HP and Dell each sell more laptops than Apple, and those three alone make up 60% of the market.

https://www.industryresearch.biz/market-reports/mobile-compu...

Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.

This Reddit post suggests this happened in iOS 13 (so 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d7wemx/underrated_ne...

Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).

Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.

I'm in the same boat. It seems like the mindset for consumer-grade hubs is to provide support for as many old, legacy devices as possible, rather than a higher number of new devices.

Another problem is that USB-A ports are dirt cheap and simple to implement, so hub makers feel like "leaving free IO on the table" by not sprinkling them on everything. Whereas each "decent" USB-C port has enough complexity to think twice about adding it.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of options. Try searching for "USB-C only hub". You will get some results, but they are basically the identical product (same IO card), just with different housings. So you can pretty much count with these specs: 1 USB-C in for power, 3–4 USB-C out, 5 or 10Gbps each, Power Delivery at various wattages. No video support.

I have one of these on my desk right now, it's from the brand "Minisopuru", I get power and four USB-C "3.2 Gen 2" ports. It's fine. But like I said, it's no Thunderbolt, and no video support, so I have to "waste" the other port on my MacBook just for my external display.

There are also Thunderbolt / USB4 devices which will give you a bonkers amount of IO, including good TB / USB-C ports usually (plus some USB-A of course, as a spit in the face – so you'd need to ignore those). But these are not hubs, they are docks, which is a different product class entirely (big and heavy, more expensive, dedicated power supply).

Something I've been doing recently to salvage the USB-A ports I still begrudgingly encounter, while continuing to (force myself to) upgrade all my devices to type-C, are these: [0]. 1-to-1 USB-A male to USB-C female adapters. I just stick them in all USB-A ports I encounter, leave them there all the time, and move on with my life. It's a bit bulky and looks kinda stupid, but it basically gives me USB-C everywhere I need (including work-issued PCs and docking stations) for just a couple of bucks. For low-bandwidth devices like headphones, keyboard / mice / gamepads, or even my phone, it works perfectly fine.

[0] – https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Adapter-10Gbps-Converter-Samsu...

Correction: Apple neither uses nor contributes to Chromium. They have WebKit, which Chromium (Blink) was forked from in 2013.

Trains are expensive upfront, which might favor buses when expanding into new areas. But if the infrastructure is already there, a train line will always be more economical in the long run than the equivalent bus line.

So ripping out existing serviceable train tracks is stupid (or alternatively: evil) if you think in the long term.

See also: the plot of Cars 2.

I’m only semi-joking.

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Allinol

Worth mentioning that Orion is fully based on WebKit. Calling it a “Safari wrapper” would be unfair, but it’s also not extremely far from that either.

(This is probably terribly obvious, but should be mentioned anyway: that's 1.4% Mac and 2.06% Linux users of Steam. Not users in general.)

> exactly one data

Datum :)

The minimum number of platforms for “cross-platform” software is by definition two (2).

…and macOS. Sandboxed Mac apps get their own little home directory in `~/Library/Containers/`. To access anything else, they need to ask through system APIs.

> I have access to all of them on my phone via Files app and the iCloud sync

TIL that "unsaved" TextEdit files automatically go to the iCloud/TextEdit folder! That changes things for sure. (It also means that there is no such thing as an unsaved TextEdit file.)

Have you given Stickies.app a try? It is designed exactly around this model (notes are never "saved" in a true sense, they just live all over your desktop, what you can do is export / import text however).

Although I'd be surprised if you haven't.

Indeed. Realistically if anything, one should consider the “physical world” hassles with permanent external storage arguably more than performance ones:

• Risk of accidental unplugging.

• Contacts may become wonky over time → see above.

• The need to sacrifice a port (or the portion of one in the case of a dongle).

• Enclosures tend to have annoying IO lights.

• Takes a bit of space.

All of these can be solved, especially when dealing with a desktop that stays in place. Paradoxically, there was never a better time to be modest with internal storage.

Although I will say:

> photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer

Over my dead body :) If there’s one thing I’ll always happily carve out SSD space for, it’s local copies of my photo library!

Basically operating at standard pre-Retina Mac DPI levels. The 27" Apple Cinema Display had exactly this resolution, as well as the 27" iMac before it went to 5K.

I agree, it works… fine. But sadly more and more elements of modern macOS will look blurry / aliased because they are only made with hi-DPI in mind.

For example all SF Symbols, as far as I know, are not defined as pixel graphics but only stored as vectors and rasterized on the fly. Which works great at high res and makes them freely scalable, but on low-DPI displays they certainly look worse than a pixel-perfect icon would.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast?

> which by its whole design and intention is supposed to be written before the number (€50,00)

What makes you think that? The intention of the € symbol is to be used exactly like other currency notations before it in each respective language. In English it’s before the number, but in many others including German, it is after (50,00 DM).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign#Use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_the_euro